Raspberry Pi#

A new gadget, see http://www.raspberrypi.org.

Installation , operation.#

Make sure you have a micro USB power supply that offers enough current (at least 700 mA) and good voltage. Use a voltmeter in case of doubt.
I had a 2 GB SD Card (the absolute minimum), and installed the default Raspbian “wheezy” on it, see http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads.
After downloading and verifying the SHA1, you can unzip it and also check the partitions in it :

metskem@athena ~/Downloads $ ls -l 2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img 
-rw-r--r-- 1 metskem metskem 1939865600 Jan  4 20:52 2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img
metskem@athena ~/Downloads $ file 2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img 
metskem@athena ~/Downloads $ sudo dd if=2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M
462+1 records in
462+1 records out
1939865600 bytes (1.9 GB) copied, 243.748 s, 8.0 MB/s
metskem@athena ~/Downloads $

Stick the network cable in, and stick the power cable in.
You should see the red LED (PWR) see lighting up, and also after a few seconds all (4) other green and yellow LEDs.
If not, either your power supply is insufficient or your SD card is not properly formatted with the right 2 partitions (that was the case with me the first time).

After booting up the first challenge is to find out the IP address it got (DHCP), so I wrote a small shell script the iterates over all 25 addresses in the range and tries to ssh pi@${address} .

After first login, you are advised to run the sudo pi-config script. I did that to set the Timezone and Locale properly.